If you been over to RBCJ-Hub lately, you will have seen a post where I touched briefly about how everything about the site etc has suffered due to ill health.

I thought I would update in more detail as to the situation.

A couple of weeks ago, I woke up struggling to breath, and every time I tried to walk anywhere, I had severe pains in my chest and side causing me to quickly get out of breath.

Panicking, I asked my wife to ring 101. The paramedic arrived and did all the routine checks etc, after about 10 minutes the ambulance crew arrived and after a short conflab with the paramedic, they decided to give me gas and air to relieve the pain, alongside codeine & paracetamol.

The pain subsided enough for me to board the ambulance and be taken to Barnsley General Hospital.
On the way, I asked what the problem could be (as rather stupidly, I left it and left it thinking it was a chest infection, lesson learned!).
Of course, they could only speculate with the symptoms I had described.

Waiting in A&E for what seemed like an eternity with my brother (god bless him for coming and meeting me at hospital) I was told I needed several blood tests.
I can’t really say what I thought, but to put it politely, I thought “Oh dear”.
After 35 years, this was my first ever blood test, and I’m scared of needles…
Now I will just clarify something, I say I am scared of needles and certainly the first thing the doctor said,
“How can you be scared of needles when you have tattoos?”, and simply my reply was, “I was pissed!”

In short, throughout the course of the day, I had 8 needles! (not much to some, but enough for me).
Trying to get blood from my wrists to test blood gases (or something like that) and blood from my arms. The reason I had so many, was, well, in short they couldn’t find a suitable vein lol…

After spending 10 and a half hours in hospital (A&E (Accident and Emergency) and AMU (Acute medical unit)) I was sent home. Yey…or not.

The suspicion of blood clots was believed to be the cause of everything, but they could not confirm this at that moment.
As they suspected blood clots, they had to treat me as such and start treatment right away to get a “head start”. In addition, I had to go to DVT for a daily blood test to monitor my INR (international normalized ratio).
Click here for more information on INR.
My INR was very low, 1.1 in fact, my therapeutic range is between 2-3. My blood was too thick, so I was given a regular (daily) injection into my stomach of Clexane. Great, more needles…

After a week or so of this action being taken, I had to have a scan on my lungs which involved laying flat on a ‘table’ and have a very noisy ‘polo mint’ type machine scan my lungs after they had injected me with a special (radioactive) dye.
The medical staff’s suspicion was confirmed. I have indeed got blood clots on both my lungs and I had suffered a Pulmonary Embolism.

Anyway…Having overcome my fear of needles (and pretty bloody quickly! (no pun intended)), as mentioned, I now have to attend regular blood tests to continue monitoring my INR, and continue on a prescribed anti-coagulant ‘Warfarin’.
So far my INR has fluctuated from 1.1 to 4.0 over the last month, but at least I am only having to go to hospital about once or twice a week now.

So, there you have it. My month in a nutshell…
Despite the seriousness of the condition, I am quite well in myself. I have a few pains and twinges now and again, occasionally I have to walk with a stick to support myself if I get breathless when I’m out and about, but other than that I am fine.

Just as a side note, after 6 months I have to be screened for something called “Factor 5 Leiden“, which is a genetically inherited blood disorder. It basically means, my blood is trying constantly to clot.

Yes, silence.
My online activities are being kept to a very extreme minimum. The reasons is I have a lot on my plate at the moment and certainly I don’t have the motivation at present.
I’m just a little stressed at the moment with a lot of things and I just need some time to work and think things through.
I’m having sleepless/restless nights and can’t seem to work out what the problem is. Personally I just think it’s an amalgamation of things with no predominant individual issue.Certainly Facebook will have very limited to know posts, only what get piggy-backed through Twitter to this domain to Facebook.

Anywhoo, I’m just thinking of the little things at the moment to get me through each day. I make it sound like I’m a manic depressive, but I’m not, just a little down perhaps.

On a slightly brighter note, I must say a massive thank you to all my friends, relatives and supporters of the site. Last month has shows well over 93,000 visits according to my hosting site stats (don’t ask me why the display at the bottom shows incorrect amounts, although this figure is a combined total from all sub-domains etc!!!)
But anyway a massive MASSIVE thank you to you all.

Other news, a good friend of mine Deano aka DJ Flight maybe settling down and living I’m Canada after he fell in love with the place, when he recently went over to visit his aunt (well to be fair, at time of writing, he’s still there)
Either way, Deano has assured me he will be having more of an input into the sites content and generally commenting on my blogs.
Whatever you choose to do mate, all the best!

If I don’t get a chance, have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

So much for holiday days, it’s rained fir the first two!
Typical!!!
Anyway, a quick note to say, all my old and new artwork us currently being rescanned and prepped fir upload to my new artgallery. The gallery itself us located at rbcsoftware.me.uk/myart. At the moment there won’t be anything there, but now you know the link.
As always keep checking back, and I hope I bring some small joy into your life.

A lot of things have happened since my last post.
1) My time with British Gas is now at an end, I have moved on to other climbs within support work. I’m glad to say I left on a very positive note and will be sad to leave the place, but I need to move on.

In addition to this, for people I worked with at British Gas I will be, shortly, posting a final message to you all.

2) I’ve just been doing some site related stuff and found that RBCSoftware – Learning by Design has just recently celebrated…wait for it…

Just over 2,000,000 unique visits (2,001,556 to be precise!) since the site was launched way back in 2007.
Now I know to some, that this amount within 3 years is quite feable, and to a degree I agree! I think overall it is quite an impressive amount for the input I put in.
So thank you one and all to all the people that keep visiting and to all those who have visited in the past.

Fetch! news now…
Things are hotting up in the Fetch! development with some cool new features in there. So far, the download its self is not available as I really do want this program to work 100% before general release. Also, there are a number of known bugs in the code which I am currently working around.
Now that I will be working 4 on 4 off shift patterns, it does give me the opportunity to work more on my projects and sites.

As with many things however, things get left by the wayside and I’m sorry to report that several aspects of my work has suffered as a result.
My DJ and download central projects are but two of these aspects that have been greatly effected, hopefully that will be put right.

Well, our boys are out of the world cup after losing 4-1 to Germany, to be fair should have been 4-2 (that bloody ref, and lines men are to blame!). Still, we have to admit that we were out played, but well done to England anyway.
I don’t normally watch football, as my previous rants may indicate the reasons why, but I still felt the urge to spur our team on, after all it is the World Cup!

Anywhoo, I’m off for the moment, gotta wake Babs up and take her out for lunch (before anyone asks, no shes not lazy, just recovering from a night shift!).

Well, time has been long, and communications have been non-existent.
This is due to the fact I really haven’t been arsed to do anything, purely because My wife, Caitlin and myself have been too knackered to do much!
Put politely!

Anywhoo, as Orange have very kindly upgraded my tariff at no extra cost, (I now have 500MB web access anytime, as opposed to before when I could only do it after 6pm and weekends) I am accessing my sites via my mobile.
But as always, load times on mobiles, PDAs etc take forever, and can become quite costly. So, because I’m such a nice guy, I have found some clever chaps over at http://mobilepress.co.za/ who can help me optimize my sites and make them operate quite smoothly, with minimum effort on mobile/cell phones using browsers such as; Opera Mini etc.

The downloads site will carry this, as it will soon be promoting some of the best software for mobile devices. As yet, however, the site is down for maintenance, as some weeks ago the database corrupted, and essentially I lost everything. On that note, what puzzles me, is why even the friggin’ backups failed to import correctly into MYSQL databases (shaking fist) curse you!

The time that I have had to do as I please, has been spent constructively testing new software.
The major of these, is Virtual DJ.

As accustomed to using turntables & CDDJs I thought I give it a whirl (turntables….whirl…geddit!?!?!)
I’ve done a few live mixes, ranging from 10mins to 1hr, some of which are online ready to be listened to.
I have to say, its quite difficult to get to grips with, as initially VDJ should be used with additional hardware, but once you have a couple of sessions with it, its ok. It is NO substitute for the real thing though.

Still as I don’t have the cash, or the space to set up the entire gaff, I’ll stick with CDDJ dex, Philips F3538 Sound processor, amps and 2x100watt speakers and my trusty computer.

As you’ve also probably guessed, as there has been no updates, my sessions at producing have very much took a back burner, alongside everything else.
Apologies to everyone expecting “miracles” of me getting it online. It aint happening yet…Perhaps a couple of samples, only maybe though.